Our goals are to determine the extent that an infant rat learns to perform certain suckling responses and/or acquires specific conditioned preferences as a consequence of suckling and then to determine whether such learning might transfer to other instrumental situations later in life. We are specifically interested in whether the pup's attraction to the mother is in any way a learned response, whether the frequency or pattern of sucking responses might be changed as a result of associating milk delivery with sucking or with the mother, and whether any acquired tendency to approach the mother or any learned components of early ingestive behavior might form the basis of an animal's predisposition to approach or avoid goal-objects in adult life. This involves learning a great deal about suckling behavior and sucking patterns, the relationship of arousal states to suckling, the ability of suckling infant rats to acquire and remember associations, and the extent that any acquired associations are cross-model and trans-situational.